Imagining Apple TV

With the mythical tablet finally out and going strong, the next object of forward-looking gadget fetishism has gotta be Apple TV. Not the TV of the set-top box "hobby" variety; the real thing. A Piper Jaffray analyst said as much, Wired speculated about it, and patents shed light on some of the company's thinking. And then it kind of makes sense, too, for Apple to get into the business of pairing quality content with beautiful screens as it has done so successfully in the past.

I've just fretted, pretty publicly, about today's television sets being way too complex and yet failing to deliver the one thing we expect from them -- an uninterrupted stream of interesting moving images. Apple, of course, knows a thing or two about simple. A DVR that would program itself, channels that would organize themselves around your interests, un-buttoned remote controls, multiple sources of content converging in the background into one seamless stream, auto-adjusting volume. All the stuff that would makes watching TV easy again in the same way iPad has made computing accessible for two-year-olds.

The downside: expensive proprietary cables, no porn, and iFart apps stretched across a 50-inch screen playing in surround sound.

-- image source

Keep Track of Media Culture To Make Better Ads

In the creative brief, right under the media plan summary, there should be a description of each media property and the particularities of its audience. Which means there's a job for someone to do nothing but watch TV, read magazines, browse the web, and take lots of notes, sort of a mix between an account and media planners.  After all, we have well-paid professionals hunting down and explaining obscure cultural phenomena - why not somebody who keeps track of the stuff that's popular today. Somebody who'd work in the Chief Culture Officer's department.

Or maybe it could be an industry publication, CliffsNotes for popular media culture. Wonder if there isn't one already.

Then we'd have more ads that enhance the primary media experience instead of interrupting it, like these Target's 15" spots that ran during Lost finale.

Retro Photos For New-Media Report

The new Razorfish Outlook report is out. My favorite part:  photographs taken by the company's employees and used to illustrate the paper and the mention that "photographs were shot on Kodak 120VC or Tri-X film with a Holga 120 camera."

That, and in its "Publishers to Watch in 2010" list, Razorfish included MySpace.

Crowdsource Crowdsourcing

Got a press release yesterday that ended with "Privileged and confidential information may be contained in this e-mail and any files transmitted with it are intended only for the use of the addressee."

Ah, what the hell:

"GeniusRocket, Victors and Spoils and 99 Designs are offering up the chance to re-name their industry, and turning to the crowd to do so. Having decided the name “crowdsourcing” just doesn’t fit anymore, they’re crowdsourcing the new name, with the best submission earning a cash reward."

The site should be up some time today and the project have been delayed.

Update (May 25, 2010): Victors and Spoils aren't involved. The project "has been delayed but should launch soon." - source: PR agency.

Udpdate: (May 26, 2010): The site is now up at renamecrowdsourcing.com.  It's little more than a submission form.

Quote of the Week

Yes, on a Monday. It's from a very well put observation that social media pros, somewhat oxymoronically, are self-centered, by a blog that writes a lot about social media.

"It’s almost like social media labors under the suspicion that if it stops talking about itself, it’ll cease to exist."

And another one by the same author but earlier:
"In our minds, we’re all Lady Gaga with a slightly smaller wardrobe."

Study: People Share Room With TV Ads

They make it sound like it's a good news.

Center for Research Excellence released new findings from their massive and very expensive ($3.5M) ethnographic study of media consumption behavior. The researchers observed and recorded behaviors of 376 adults in four markets for the average period of 33 hours each or roughly two full waking days (or "three-quarters of a million minutes" altogether, as they prefer to put it.)  It looks like they used methodology and tools developed by Ball State Uni's Center for Media Design for its Middletown Media Study, which I've been following here closely since 2006.

The press release is pretty celebratory throughout, starting with the headline "Most TV Viewers Do Not Leave the Room or Even Change Channels During Commercial Breaks."

The study was funded by Nielsen.

A supposedly sympathetic media executive is quoted as wondering rhetorically: "Do viewers actually pay attention during commercial breaks?"

Great question. Let's see what we can milk from the data highlights since the press release never answers it directly.

- 20% change rooms during a commercial break
- 86% of viewers remain with live TV during commercials (that is, don't change channels)
- Multi-tasking was found to accompany about 45% of all media use. That's 45% of the 80% who stay in the room. "Multitasking" here does not include concurrent usage of other media, as seen on the graph below (source: pdf).  And of them, 86% stay on the same channel.

In other words, about 38 people out of 100 (that is, 100 x 0.80 x 0.86 x 0.55 - does the math check out?) are in the same room and on the same channel as TV commercials and aren't working, eating, or attending to personal or religious needs.

Now, to fill in the gap on concurrent media exposure.  In Ball State's original media study in 2006, which was smaller in scope but similar in methodology, researchers found out that TV is an uncontested (single-exposure) medium during 71.5% percent of total minutes it is on (pdf).  (According to a different, newer Three Screen report, 59% of people use TV and Internet at the same time at least once a month.)

So, in the end, we probably have a whopping 20% of the people sitting in front of commercials not doing anything else, maybe paying attention. Maybe.

- via Ad Contrarian, who, too, thinks the news is good.

Intent, Context, Beer, Diapers, and Fishing

Hunch's Chris Dixon wrote a great blog post over the weekend about Facebook, Google and the difference between ads that create intent and ads that harvest intent. Hunch, being a recommendation engine, is, of course, all about harvesting intent. (I failed pretty miserably at their Twitter Predictor game with about 30% correct answers. Or maybe it was the game that failed, I don't know).

His post reminded me of two things. One is the urban legend about grocery stores putting beer next to diapers to boost sales of both.

The other one is an old Internet joke that not only has a lot to do with intent and contextual advertising but also points at the ideal state of things, at least from the advertiser perspective. It goes like this.

A young guy from a village moves to a big city and goes to a huge department store looking for a job. The manager asks him whether he has any sales experience, and the guy says that yeah, he was a salesman back in his village.

The guy gets the gig, the first day passes, and the manager stops by to check in on things.

“How many customers bought something from you today?”

The guy says, “one”.

“Just one? Our sales people average 20 to 30 customers a day. How much was the sale for?”

The guy says, “$101,237.65″.

The boss says, “$101,237.65? What the heck did you sell?”

The guy says, “First, I sold him a small fish hook. Then I sold him a medium fishhook. Then I sold him a larger fishhook.

Then I sold him a new fishing rod. Then I asked him where he was going fishing and he said down the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat, so we went down to the boat department and I sold him a twin engine Chris Craft. Then he said he didn’t think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him that 4×4 Expedition.”

The boss said, “A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a boat and truck?”

The guy said, “No, the dude came in here to buy tampons for his wife, and I said, dude, your weekend’s shot. You might as well go fishing.”

Dear Agency of The Year, You Suck

AdAge on Monday "wallowed in consumer generated advertising's trough of disillusionment", in the twittered words of @AdHack. The piece opened with " Dear consumer, Your 15 minutes are over. You suck."

It's the same consumer whom AdAge pronounced The Agency of the Year in 2007.

Rich, the author, called last week for a quote. I told him it's silly to dismiss the entire genre. Every time you have doubts about consumers' creative potential, head over to The Best of Craigslist, or Flickr's Explore, or The Sims Marketplace.

Yes, asking people who don't have any film-making experience to shoot a TV spot for you isn't very likely to result in anything.  But it isn't the only way to involve consumers into the ad-making process either. Ask people to do something they already know how to do and enjoying doing, and you'll get brilliant things like Nikon's Stunning Gallery or Chrysler's machinima.

Or else it's crap in, crap out.

Closely related:
Media Pendulum Swings On Second Life
Busted: Another "Consumer-Generated Ad" Myth

Celebrity Posters Reverse-Photoshopped

Photoshop GUI cut-outs pasted over celebrity posters in Berlin by a street art group. (I also like a similar use of Doom GUI over billboards.)

Comcast Turns iPad Into Xfinity Remote

From Comcast's blog: "Comcast Labs has developed a prototype of a web-based remote control that will extend our interactive programming guide to many IP-enabled devices. The Xfinity Remote, which Brian Roberts demoed today on an iPad at the NCTA show, enables you to search for your favorite shows and movies on television and video on demand, change the channel on your cable box right from your iPad, and set your DVR remotely."

Comcast already has a DVR remote for iPod touch and iPhone.  It also has a site for its Comcast Interactive Media Labs; wonder if it's the same as "Comcast Labs" above.